Comparative performance evaluation of EDCF and EY-NPMA protocols

Medium access represents one of the most critical building blocks regarding the performance of a wireless LAN. In this letter, we compare the performance of two well-known medium access control protocols specifically developed for the wireless environment, EDCF and EY-NPMA. To our knowledge, it is the first time that these two quality-of-service (QoS) aware medium access schemes are compared. Furthermore, we propose a novel scheme for medium access based on EY-NPMA, that demonstrates reduced overhead compared to the base protocol and better utilization of the common medium. The conclusions of this paper are based on extensive simulation trials.